Jackie Garner seemed bemused by her presence.
‘She’s deaf, right?’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s why you don’t have to whisper.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ He thought about it, but kept whispering. ‘How’s a deaf woman going to get by in the woods?’
‘She’s deaf, Jackie, not blind.’
‘I know, but we gotta be quiet, don’t we?’
‘She’s also a mute. I’m no expert, but people who can’t speak tend to be quieter than the rest of us.’
‘Suppose she steps on a twig, and makes a noise. How will she know?’
Angel joined us. ‘What are you, some kind of Buddhist? If a tree falls in the forest, I can tell you now that she won’t hear it.’
Jackie shook his head in frustration. We were clearly missing the point.
‘She’s coming with us, Jackie,’ I told him. ‘Live with it.’
We didn’t plan to be in the woods after dark, but Jackie had still insisted that we bring a groundsheet each. We also had plenty of water, coffee, chocolate, energy bars, nuts, and, courtesy of Jackie, a bag of pasta. Even with the addition of Liat, we had enough to keep us going for a day or more. There were also waterproof matches, cups, one lightweight saucepan, a pair of compasses, and a GPS unit, although Jackie said that we might have trouble getting a signal where we were going. We divided the equipment and supplies between us, and set out. There was no further discussion. We all knew what we were looking for, and what might be out there. I hadn’t shared what we suspected of Malphas’s possible nature with Jackie, and so Jackie had been skeptical that anyone who had survived the crash might still be out there. I shared something of his point of view, but I wasn’t about to bet my life, or anyone else’s, on it.
Jackie led, Louis behind him, then Liat, Angel, and I. Jackie’s concerns about Liat were unfounded: of all of us, it was she who stepped the softest. While Angel and Louis, unused to the woods, wore leather boots with thick treads, Liat, Jackie and I wore lighter boots with only slight ribbing, the better to feel what lay beneath our feet. Treads could mean the difference between stepping on a branch and bending it, or breaking it entirely. For now we also wore orange vests, and baseball caps with reflective strips. We didn’t want some overenthusiastic hunter to mistake us for deer, or raise the suspicions of a warden if we encountered one. Thirty minutes in we heard gunshots to the south, but otherwise we might have been entirely alone in the woods.
The going was relatively easy for the first couple of hours, but then the terrain began to change. There were more ridges to climb, and I could feel the strain in the backs of my legs. Shortly after midday we startled an adolescent buck from a copse of alder, his antlers little more than extended buds, and later there was a flash of brown and white to our left as a doe moved quickly through the trees. She spotted us, seemed to pause in confusion, and changed direction, cutting away from us until we lost sight of her. We noticed the trace of bigger bucks, and there were places where the stink of deer urine was strong enough to make one gag, but those were the only large animals we saw.
After three hours, we stopped and made coffee. Despite the cold, I was sweating under my jacket, and I was grateful for the rest. Louis dropped beside me.
‘How you doing, city boy?’ I said.
‘Yeah, like you Grizzly Adams,’ he replied. ‘How much farther?’
‘Two hours, I reckon, if we keep making this kind of progress.’
‘Damn.’ He pointed at the sky. There were clouds gathering. ‘Doesn’t look good.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’
Jackie finished brewing the coffee and served it up. He gave his cup to Liat, and drank his own by pouring it from the pot into a small thermos. He separated himself from the rest of us, and stood on a small ridge looking back in the direction from which we had come. I followed him up there. He didn’t look happy.
‘You okay?’ I asked.
‘Rattled, that’s all,’ he said.
‘By what we’re doing?’
‘And where we’re going.’
‘In and out, Jackie. We’re not planning on settling there.’
‘I guess.’ He swished the coffee around in his mouth, and spat. ‘And there’s the doe we saw.’
‘What about it?’
‘Something spooked it, and it wasn’t us.’
I stared out at the forest. This wasn’t first growth, and so the foliage was still thick.
‘Could have been a hunter,’ I said. ‘Even a bobcat or a lynx.’
‘Like I said, maybe I’m just rattled.’
‘We could hold back, see if anyone comes,’ I said, ‘but there’s rain on the way, and whatever hope we have of finding that plane depends on good light. And we don’t want to be stuck out here for a night.’
Jackie shivered. ‘I hear that. Come dark, I want to be in a bar with a drink in my hand, and that fort far behind me.’
We returned to the others. Liat approached me. I couldn’t have mistaken the questioning look on her face, but she still mouthed the words, just to be sure: What is it?
‘Jackie was concerned that something might have spooked the doe we saw earlier,’ I answered, loud enough for Angel and Louis to hear. ‘Something, or someone, following behind us.’
She extended her hand. Another question: What do we do?
‘It could be nothing, so we keep going. If there is someone following, we’ll find out who it is soon enough.’
Jackie poured the rest of the coffee into his thermos, packed away his little Primus stove, and we moved off, but there was a palpable change in our mood. I found myself checking behind me as we walked, and Jackie and I would pause on the higher ridges, seeking movement on the lower ground.
But we saw no one, and at last we came to the fort.